Spent the past couple weeks intently working on the crazy quilt. Getting better at the rocking stitch now that my hands no longer hold up the hoop.
Here’s my new setup:
I’ve got about a quarter quilted. Looking forward to quilting through the debates and super Tuesday coverage.
No, I do not have a rock band, but I do need three hands. Used the latest crazy quilt to experiment with my actual quilting technique. Got everything basted last night and took a stab at it.
I’ve got three different thimbles, and none of them really work properly. I’ve got 6 different sizes of sharp needle. I think I’m trying to make too many stitches with the smallest size, but I really enjoy the control and the stitch detail and the large size of stitch with the larger needle. Yes, I know this flies in the face of coveted quilting technique.
This is also the crazy part: I’m freeform quliting. I have a few simple rules, and I just try to follow the lines I have already made.
The good news is that I seem to have mastered the “pulling the single knot through the top” process. It allows the knot to get stuck inbetween the top layer of fabric and the badding, hiding it. I completely rock at it.
I need three hands, because one hand holds and guides the needle, one hand scrunches and sandwiches the quilt, and the third hand holds the hoop. May just have to poke a hole through a TV tray or something. If only I had the AWESOME rig the old ladies at the Methodist church used to have. That’s OK. It would take up too much space anyway.
Pictures later!
This weekend turned up the heat on quilting progress. Watched the Nevada/South Carolina presidential returns while piecing together the outer strips. At this point the quilt measures 84” x 84”, and any kind of border could possibly increase the size to measure queen size.
purchased the badding and the backing with a gift certificate I got for CRAFTSMAS from my friend Katie. We met at the quilt store and checked out a bunch of fabrics. The Calico House is such a treasure!
Here is the progress picture:
Here is the awesome sorta 70s floral print for the backing:
Thank goodness I had to send off gifts to NY state by December 15th, otherwise, I would have never finished this gift!
The rug is the “Labyrinth Rug” from Leigh Radford’s _Knitted_Gifts_. I let my friend Sarah borrow the book while she was in the hospital, so I purchased the internal cotton cording without the pattern. The cording I got was much smaller than what the pattern called for, and this meant more knitting and more stitching the cord together as a rug.
The finished size is just over 26 inches. It is small for a rug, but as the circle winds around, it just takes longer to get another inch. Those last two inches almost did not get done.
Gave the rug to my mother for Christmas, and she said she was going to hang it on the wall. Now she says she just keeps it on a table. I think this would be a really cool way to upholster a piece of furniture.
I want to make one for myself someday. I still have 20 ft of cord left. Maybe I should double it up.
For the past several Tuesdays, I’ve been watching election results and quilting. I’m hoping to make a queen-sized crazy quilt, but to get the 84×94 size, but I think I only have 60×80 size. At first it was a bargello quilt, but then I went crazy.
Got a gift certificate from The Calico House, which I’m going to use for organic cotton batting and backing.
I know I’ve got a problem with the quilt surface not being completely flat, but getting it properly tied should take care of that. I worked on extending the quilt last night, but I just end up making foot x foot pre-bargelloed blocks and lengths of crazy blocks. I could do that for an extra long time. The pieces have become more square over time.
And the Christmas gifts just keep coming. You may remember this post, where I talked about the fine japanese art of amigrumi.
I had a friend that said she enjoyed the dolls on smosch.com, so I decided to make her one. Here are the pictures:
I’ve got a bunch of “free” time coming up, and I’m weighing sticking to the utilitarian craft I know against some more conceptual installation craft ideas.
Although I haven’t committed to any presidential candidate yet, I do enjoy the western states’ tradition of making yard signs. During the 2004 election, I was in northern California and Nevada, and the hand-made/hand-painted signs were just amazing. When I finally commit, I think it would be fun to do something with my garage door and magnets. It is probably a good thing most city and suburb dwellers do not realize garage doors are metal. If something conceptual pops up, that will be the first place it is expressed. Off to find some high-quality cheap magnets!
My sister knows me pretty well. She knows she can have an idea for a craft rolling around her brain, and she can have all of the raw materials and still not get it done, or totally commit to it. All she has to do is clue me in on the awesomeness of her project and I’m in. It happened like that when she went on the Atkins diet and lost some weight but wanted to lose more. Soon we were frying up huge batches of bacon on the weekends to eat with our weekly lunches of cream-fortified jell-o, pickles, meaty salads, and cheese slices.
This year for Christmas, she brought a bunch of organic cotton T-shirts home with a few colors of acrylic paint and some sort of “fabric paint medium”. Looks like we could have used any sort of regular fabric paint too. She made one for my brother’s girlfriend and Tyrone. We had fun working together and using the iron, although I could have used more color choices. In the end, the light green looks pretty cool.
Here’s how it turned out:
The print is based on a dandelion seed print I once saw, but I couldn’t get the detail I wanted with the freezer paper. I really should probably learn how to screen print someday.
For the record, I think this is the 4th brown T-shirt I own. After the Prairie Schooner ones, I think they have all have some sort of pastel ink on them too. My sister Jen made Tyrone a shirt with concentric circles on it. Yep, it looks like a target, but it is centered more on his right side, “to throw ‘em off.”
Got the elastic in on Tuesday night and wore it to work on Wednesday. It may need a little blocking. The A-shape is a little weighted down by the seams on the sides:
From Vogue Knitting magazine Winter 05/06 in Woodstock Wool company baby alpaca, color chocolate.
I’ve got several bigger projects on the horizion, and I finished the Aran Skirt last night. Pictures to follow tomorrow!
Up next is the Green Gable Hoodie. Thank goodness Redlipstick.net posted a link to the pattern before Vogue Knitting snapped it up! I bought the yarn for it 2 months ago with a gift certificate Tyrone got me for my birthday.
Back to the CRAFTSMAS pictures! I think I may try to sell this pattern? Of course, the yarn is free, so that makes it pretty much unsellable. I have the pattern written somewhere, so maybe I’ll post it to the site. I made Ruth and Sara yoga mat bags!
I really have a soft spot in my heart for that recycled-bag plastic “yarn”. The more colors, the better. Ruth got an orange stripe in hers since it was her wedding color.
This year, after many years of saying, “we should make our own bath bombs,” I finally purchased the items needed. The friend who always said we should make them propmptly went to the hospital for a month, so I went on alone.
I tried using notmartha.org’s instructions. They were helpful to a point, and made more sense after I tried to make them once. The site references another recipe, Brenda Sharpe’s, which helped even more the second time.
Pictures! Prep:
At the end I just had a sort of oozing mess, which I figured would crust, so I put them into little truffle holders:
Final pieces of advice: Give up on the perfectly round bombs. Use the correct proportion from the recipe, and then just mold the mix into half-bombs, cup cake pan indentations, or measuring cups. Give each bomb a few minutes to settle and react to form an outer “crust” and then lightly pop them out onto a pan with a towel above and below the bomb to dry. Keep these puppies covered for a day before packaging them.
Stefanie Japel from glampyre.com also made cocoa ones. She put them in star-shaped cupcake bins. I want to try that next.
